Bug #3008

Can't compile ruby without ruby

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What happened:
I tried to compile ruby 1.9.1-p376 on a new unix system(s). (Linux and Solaris).
I get the error:
executable host ruby is required. use --with-baseruby option.
make: *** [miniprelude.c] Error 1

What I expected:
I expect that ruby should compile.

There are no docs for how to get around this. How can I get ruby on a system if I can't compile ruby?
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Some of the ruby 1.9 build scripts are written in ruby. So, you must have an existing ruby already in order to build ruby 1.9. I had thought that the usual workaround was to build a ruby 1.8 release first (which doesn't have this restriction) and then use that to bootstrap 1.9. (I think perhaps Yusuke misspoke when he pointed you at a 1.9 tarball.....?)

This is a known limitation of ruby 1.9. It's not a terribly happy situation, but its not likely to be fixed soon either.
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I have built ruby 1.9.1 (p376 and p378) on several computers without an existing ruby interpreter. It has always successfully built a 'miniruby' to interpret scripts in the build process when I have used it. I have done this successfully in Cygwin, Ubuntu Linux and Debian Linux.
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